It is now almost 5 years since the Australian Government launched its 2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda, and over a year since the “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0″ Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce was handed down. It seems that many government departments and agencies involved in e-health have deliberately side-stepped […]

There is much frustration with the slow progress in e-health around the world over the past decade or more. That frustration leads to partisan views and divisiveness across and within organisations about how to improve the situation. Some argue that much more money should be spent. Others argue that the amount of money is not […]

Implementing a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system through grant funded proposals submitted by interested parties seems to me a strange way to implement national infrastructure of any kind. It might be a common mechanism for funding projects in the arts, and for scientific research, where we don’t know what we might end […]

On December the 8th, 2010 the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) published an extraordinary “Report to the President realizing the full potential of health information technology to improve healthcare for Americans: the path forward“. This report is extraordinary for a number of reasons. Firstly,  PCAST is not comprised of government […]

Amongst the frenetic activity arising from Health Minister Roxon’s promise to have a personally controlled health record (PCEHR) available to all Australians by July 2012, and her more recent announcement of a summit on the subject at the end of November, comes the spawning of a spate of related articles in the media. In particular, […]

I started out titling this post “the getting of wisdom”, but slowly came around to acknowledge that there has been some real wisdom generated in health informatics over the years – it just seems to mysteriously dissipate like dry ice on a sunny day, simply adding to the world’s increasing entropy. People ignore it. People […]

I’ve just had a consultation for blocked ears, with a GP at a busy Adelaide clinic. People have told me I don’t listen, but this was definitely a hearing problem. GP took a swab, cleaned me out, gave me a computer-printed prescription for drops and antibiotics, handed me a tiny hand-scrawled chit and sent me on my […]

A few days ago I singled out Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), perhaps unfairly, in a posting about what seems to me to be widespread ignorance of  a profound issue in e-health – that of information usefulness ( or the lack thereof ). That might be hard to believe, given that the USA government has […]

Just a whisker over 10 years ago, closely following the release of the National Electronic Health Records Task Force’s  landmark report, but before “e-health” or “electronic health records” became household words,  a National Health Online Summit was held in Adelaide. It seems like Australia has taken a few steps forward, but possibly even more  backwards, […]

Whilst we linger in the doldrums of the post-election impasse, there have been some interesting media articles regarding e-health in Australia, furnished particularly during the Health Informatics Society of Australia’s annual conference. Although I didn’t attend this year, two particularly disturbing reports have drawn my attention – one by England’s Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, worried (according […]